by JoAnn Ross
“So I did. But it was two blocks from your shop to my suite. This is a bit more of a trip.”
He wasn’t going to make this easy on her. He hadn’t even asked her to sit down. So much for her midnight fantasies of him dragging her down onto his casting couch and ravishing her the moment she walked in the door.
“True. But being a firm believer in the value of service, I’ve always been willing to go the extra mile to keep a valuable customer.”
She took out the small, black silk drawstring pouch containing a vial of rose water made from petals picked while they were still wet from morning dew, seven vanilla beans, a lock of her hair tied with a red ribbon, and a small seashell she’d picked up on the Tybee Island beach and charged beneath the full moon.
“I’ve written the spell on a piece of paper. It’s best that after you do it you place the package beneath your lover’s bed for seven days and seven nights.”
“That presupposes that I’ll be anywhere near my lover’s bed for the next seven days and nights.”
“Well, all magic has its challenges.” She echoed his neutral tone, which was beginning to make her last nerve screech.
Deciding that, having tried subtle, it was now time to pull out all the stops, she went around the desk and settled herself in his lap.
He might have been able to keep his desire for her from his voice, but the enormous erection pressing against her bottom was proof that he was no more immune to her than she was to him.
“What are you doing here, Roxi?” he asked. “Really?”
“That should be obvious, cher.” She began unbuttoning his shirt. “I’ve come to seduce you.”
He sucked in a sharp breath when she pressed a wet, openmouthed kiss against his chest. “I do so love the taste of your skin.” Her lips skimmed over him, reveling in the rich male flavor she’d been dreaming of ever since he’d been gone. “It tastes so dark. And warm.” She circled his nipple with the tip of her tongue and felt his penis leap. “And forbidden. It’s the dark side of the dream.”
He thrust his hands through her hair, burying his face in the sleek black strands. “You’ve changed your scent.”
“Because I’ve changed. I blended it up special to help me seduce you.” She pressed her lips against the hollow in his dark throat, thrilled that his pulse echoed the trip-hammer beat of her own heart. “Is it working?”
He caught hold of her waist, shifting her on his lap. “You know damn well it is.”
His hand slid up her bare thigh, slipped beneath the sherbet pink, yellow, and green skirt, and discovered hidden delights.
“Damn, sugar. You must’ve been in one hurry this morning, leaving Savannah without your underwear.”
“I haven’t worn panties since you left,” she revealed. “I’ve been walking bare-crotched all around Savannah, feeling the river breeze and the heat on my pussy, imagining your hands and your mouth on me there, remembering how you felt inside me.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing.” He dipped a finger into the moist cleft, causing a secret thrill. “Doing the same damn thing and it’s been driving me fuckin’ nuts.”
He shifted her slightly again, giving him access to the fly of his jeans, opening the metal buttons with hands that were not nearly as steady as Roxi remembered them.
Her eyes went dark and warm as she took his freed cock in one silken hand, brushing her thumb over the drop of pre-cum.
Her gaze, when she lifted it to his, shone with a heady mix of lust and what he knew to be love. “I’ve never felt this way with any man,” she murmured wonderingly. “Oh, I’ve had sex before. Good sex. Even great sex.”
“Well, that does a helluva lot for my ego.”
She laughed like the sexy, seductive witch she was, then anointed the thick and throbbing head of his penis with her lips. “It’s another world with you.” She looked up at him again, her heart in her eyes. “You’ve got a dark and dangerous aura at times that both scares me and thrills me. But at the same time, whenever I’m with you, I feel totally safe. As if I’m exactly where I belong.”
“I’ve felt the same way. From the first. The dark and light.” He skimmed a finger over the pendant he’d bought to symbolize it. “All in one.”
“Yes.” She smiled. Lifted her face for a long, deep, soulful kiss. “I thought it would be hard.”
“It is.”
“No.” This time her laugh was merry, reminding him of sunshine on water. “I meant submitting. Not sexually, which is exciting on occasion, but giving myself—all of me—to another person.” She framed his face in her hands. “But once I made the decision, it was not only easy but exactly right. Because Beltane was all about looking ahead, not back, and I realize that whatever the future brings, you’ll be there with me.”
“I know the feeling.” His own laugh was one of pent-up relief. “Very well.”
Her nerves settled, she glanced around the room, her gaze settling on the black leather sofa.
“Is that your casting couch?”
“Why?” He arched a sardonic brow. “Do you feel like auditioning for a part?”
“Actually, I do.” She slid off his lap and pulled her dress over her head. Then stood before him wearing only a pair of strappy pink Manolos and perfumed and powdered skin. “I want to audition for the part of your wife.”
Desire. Lust. Gratitude. And love. She could read them all on his beautifully sculpted face.
“That’s a very important role,” he said. “It’s important I choose right.”
“Oh, Mr. Movie Director, I so agree,” she said in a breathless little Marilyn Monroe voice she’d practiced back in junior high. It had worked then. It worked now. “I’ll do anything to get the part.” She trailed a hand across the crest of her breasts. Around her taut and tingling nipples. “Absolutely anything.”
He stood up, crossed the room and locked the door. Then scooped her into his arms.
“I hope you didn’t have any other auditions scheduled for today, sugar,” he said as he carried her over to the couch. “Because this may take a while.”
A full moon rode high in sky, casting a warm and benevolent white light over the Southern California coast, illuminating the man and woman.
“Mine.” He needed to say the word out loud. Needed to hear her response.
She didn’t hesitate. “Yours,” she agreed on a soft, shimmering breath.
For all time.
Clinging to him, her body bowed, her slender hands racing up and down his back while she chanted words from an ancient time, the witch opened completely. Utterly.
As the man opened to her.
And together, moving to music only they could hear, they surrendered to the magic of the night.
DEAR SANTA
One
The deer came flying out of nowhere, a flash of dark brown in a swirling white-on-white world.
At least it seemed that way.
One minute Holly Berry was driving on the winding, two-lane road that snaked through Washington’s Cascade Mountains at a crawl, straining her eyes to see through the wall of white snow piling up too fast for even her furiously working windshield wipers to handle. The next minute she was fishtailing into a series of dizzying spins that a gold-medalist Olympic skater would’ve envied, sliding helplessly toward the edge of the cliff.
That’s when she realized that it was true—your life really did flash before your eyes just before you died.
“You’re not going to die,” she insisted, as if saying it out-loud could make it true.
After what seemed a lifetime, but in real time was only a few seconds, her SUV slammed into an ice-encrusted snowbank.
Then pow!
While her heart was pounding like an angry fist against her ribs, the airbag exploded from the center of her steering wheel in her face.
Which wasn’t exactly like getting hit by a marshmallow.
Actually, it hurt. A lot.
It also filled the car with acrid smoke and a fine
powder she’d managed to suck into her lungs as she’d shouted out a string of curses that turned the smoky air even bluer and would’ve made a sailor on shore leave proud.
Unfortunately, as soon as she’d opened her mouth, she’d sucked the stuff in, which triggered a coughing fit as she fought against the bag that was—thank you God!—quickly deflating.
That, and the fact she was alive, was the good news.
Once the huge white bag was out of her face, she could see that not only had it cracked the windshield, her dashboard looked as if a maniac had attacked it with a sledgehammer. And steam was rising from beneath the snowbank, hinting at a burst radiator.
Which was, she feared, just the beginning of even more bad news.
“And wow, isn’t this just what you need?”
The rain that had been falling when she’d left her downtown Seattle apartment had turned to sleet as she’d crossed the bridge into east King County. She’d thought things were looking up as she began driving into the mountains and the sleet was replaced by a scattering of downy white flakes.
Unfortunately, by the time that deer had leaped in front of her, the damn snow had escalated into something close to a blizzard.
Dammit, she never should’ve swerved. Then again, if she’d continued to drive straight ahead, she would’ve risked hitting the deer, which could’ve resulted in it flying through her windshield onto her lap.
And wouldn’t have that just been fun?
Since her electrical system seemed to have been killed, the windows wouldn’t go down, so, shoving the deflated nylon bag out of her way, she cracked open the driver’s door to let out some of the smoke. Which, in turn, let wind-driven snow come swirling in.
Retrieving her purse from where it had fallen onto the floor, she took out her cell phone and flipped it open. Unsurprisingly, given her remote location in these mountains, her screen showed no signal bars.
“And isn’t this a fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into,” she muttered as she wiped the air bag talc off her face with one of the wet wipes she always carried with her and tried to decide what to do next.
Holly had always prided herself on her practicality. Oh, she was aware that creative people were considered by many to be flighty. Unpredictable. Impulsive. Even undependable.
But just because she told stories for a living didn’t mean that she didn’t plan every single detail of her books. She’d plot the stories for weeks, even months beforehand, each and every scene carefully detailed on Post-its, color coded by character, and stuck onto the huge board that took up a major portion of her office wall. She never wrote so much as a first line without first knowing her characters’ goals, motivation, and conflict. And each and every scene in each and every chapter was totally completed to her satisfaction before she moved on to the next.
Real life, to her mind, was no different. Which meant that her goal was to get herself out of this mess and her motivation was to do so before she froze to death—which was, needless to say, the ultimate conflict of man (or in her case, woman) against nature.
She knew the conventional wisdom was to stay with the vehicle so search teams could find her. The problem was that it could take several days for anyone to even realize she was missing. Oh, sure, the hotel in Leavenworth was expecting her this evening, but if she didn’t show up, the desk clerk would undoubtedly just shrug it off as yet another undependable guest, and, since she’d given them her AMEX number to guarantee the room, they’d just run her card and not give her another thought.
Since the crash and subsequent air bag explosion had also disabled her dashboard GPS, Holly had no idea of exactly where she was. Actually, she’d begun to suspect that the calm female voice directing her over the mountains may have made a mistake, because although she’d never driven this way before, it seemed the highway should be four lanes, not the two that had, because of snowplows, narrowed down to about one and a half.
Unfortunately, the Washington state road map she’d bought as a backup was still sitting on her kitchen counter. The totally uncharacteristic oversight had her grinding her teeth even as she assured herself that just as she’d gotten her last heroine away from that serial killer, she could plot her way out of this predicament.
Holly’s idea of exercise might be walking to Starbucks down the street from her apartment, but surely she could hike to wherever the next town was. And wouldn’t movement keep her warmer than if she stayed here, shivering inside her disabled vehicle, like a damsel in distress waiting for a white knight in a shiny suit of armor to show up?
Of course, the flip side of that was that trudging through the snow could expend energy. Which wouldn’t be good. Also, the sun was sinking lower and lower behind the mountains and no way did she want to risk becoming dinner for a mountain lion or bear.
Since this was, after all, supposedly a major road, surely the state would have the snow plows out working to stay ahead of the storm. A storm that hadn’t even shown up on the weather channel. She’d checked the forecast before leaving her apartment.
Forty-five minutes later, as the snow kept falling and the sky darkened to a deep purplish blue, and her fingertips, even inside her leather gloves, had begun turning to ice, and Holly was beginning to get seriously concerned, she thought she heard the low drone of a car engine.
Of course, that could just be a hallucination.
Or a dream.
Didn’t people fall asleep as they were freezing to death? She was sure she’d read that somewhere.
Using her gloved hand to wipe the steam off the window, she saw a fire engine red Ford Expedition, which dwarfed her stuck Highlander, come chugging out of the storm and pull to a stop.
Even as she could have sworn she heard a chorus of angels singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah, the Expedition’s door opened and a pair of long legs, clad in jeans and a pair of heavy PAK boots, swiveled out.
The rest of him, wearing a dark blue parka, followed. Despite those angel voices of joyous relief ringing in her mind, all the research over the years she’d done for her mystery novels had left Holly more distrustful than the average woman.
Still, while it was difficult to tell through the swirling snow, he didn’t look like a serial killer.
Of course, neither had Ted Bundy. Who, now that she thought about it, just happened to have been from Washington state. As had the Green River Killer, along with several others, including the never apprehended Snohomish County dismemberment killer she’d used as a model for the villain in her first novel.
He was getting closer, his stride long and purposeful as he crunched through the snow.
Feeling as if she was in some woman-in-jeopardy movie, Holly retrieved her Zeus Lightning Bolt stun pen from her bag and slipped it into her jacket pocket.
Two
It was amazing how much a guy’s life could change in twelve months, Gabriel O’Halloran considered as he cautiously made his way around the twisting switchbacks of the icy mountain road. This time last year, he’d been in Iraq, patrolling streets, dodging insurgent gunfire, praying like hell that he and his fellow Marines wouldn’t get blown to pieces by an IED.
On a sixty-five-degree Christmas morning, while on patrol, his team had nearly walked into an ambush. Fortunately, one of the bad guys had gotten trigger-happy and begun to shoot as the first Marine entered the alley. Even better was that his “pray and spray” gunfire hadn’t managed to hit anyone.
The battle, which was a long way from the peace the season was supposed to celebrate, lasted less than five minutes. The insurgents, knowing when they were outgunned, faded away, undoubtedly to fight another day.
As leader of the patrol, Gabe could have ordered the team to go after them. Deciding he didn’t want to be responsible for any deaths on Christmas Day, they’d returned to camp in time for a traditional feast of prime rib, turkey with cornbread stuffing, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie, served up by a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound master sergeant wearing a red, white, an
d blue Santa Claus hat.
Now, here Gabe was, plowing his way through a frigging blizzard, tires crunching beneath the snow, the radio reporting road closures and accidents throughout the mountains, his eyes burning from trying to focus on the road as he doggedly made his way in near whiteout conditions home to a town that had boasted the teeming population of six hundred and twenty-five.
Six hundred and twenty-seven now that he and Emma had settled in.
Having spent his teenage years trying to escape his hometown, then intending to be career military, becoming a Christmas tree farmer and running an inn and bar wasn’t the future he’d planned. Not by a long shot. But having seen a great deal of the world, despite the twists and turns his personal road had taken over the last few months, he had begun to enjoy himself.
Hell, he even had a dog, who was currently curled up in the backseat, snoring away like a souped-up chainsaw.
Couldn’t get much more damn domesticated than that.
He’d just cautiously maneuvered around a particularly nasty S-curve, his studded tires crunching on the icy pavement, when he viewed an SUV partly buried in a snowbank. Pulling as far as he could off the road, he set the emergency brake.
The dog, having been born into a war zone, immediately sensed trouble. Choosing flight over fight, he scrambled off the seat onto the floor, where he somehow managed to curl up into a remarkably small ball, considering that the last time he’d been weighed at the vet, he’d come in at one hundred and thirty pounds.
“Stay,” he told the dog as he retrieved the first aid kit—just in case—from the floor.
The dog looked conflicted. On one hand, or, more accurately, paw, he obviously wanted to stay hunkered down out of danger. On the other, he’d spent nine months of Gabe’s thirteen-month second tour on patrol loyally sticking close to the squad of Marines who’d adopted him.
“Stay,” Gabe repeated, holding up a hand. “Everything’ll be okay.”
Gabe hoped.
He’d no sooner jumped out of the Expedition when a woman stumbled out of the disabled Highlander. She was tall, leggy, and wearing a scarlet ski jacket, snug black jeans, and sheepskin-lined boots that rose nearly to her knees.